8: A gripping dark fantasy mystery

by Georgina Bartlett

  8

  Georgina Bartlett

  Copyright © 2021 by Georgina Bartlett

  Artwork: Adobe Stock: © jozefklopacka

  Design: Services for Authors

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat/darkstroke except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.

  First Dark Edition, darkstroke. 2021

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  something nice will happen.

  To my parents, Sarah and Pete, for bringing me into a life of happiness and laughter.

  To my siblings, Keiren, Hannah and Jordan. The greatest gift I’ll receive in life is the three of you.

  To my husband, Colin. You make me happier than I ever thought possible. I expected the butterflies to fade, but they remain ever present.

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thank you to darkstroke for taking a chance on me and releasing my dream into the world, to my editor Laurence Patterson for his patience and help in making Eight better than it started out, and a huge thank you to Steph and Laurence for their tireless hard-work and contagious perseverance.

  To the girls in the ‘Writers who wine’ group. This book wouldn’t have happened without your guidance or support. I can never thank you enough.

  About the Author

  Georgina Bartlett is currently studying English Literature and creative writing through the open university and lives with her husband in Berkshire, UK. She had a passion for writing from a very young age, but started to get serious about it when her secondary school English Literature teacher pushed her to explore new and exiting stories. Even though it goes against unpopular opinion, she is a cat person and enjoys rainy days and thunderstorms.

  One

  It was the perfect day to shoot. The skies were blue with not a cloud in sight; a day fit for a king. The shotgun felt good in his hand, a comfortable weight. He swung it up to his eye a few times, getting a feel for the drag of the gun through the air, before he shouted, “Pull.” A skeet flew, through the machine with swift speed, but he was ready for it, his gun dragged through the air, up to his eyeline. And he felt a smile spread across his face as he hit his target and it ruptured into a fine pink dust. As the king readied himself for another skeet, he heard gallops across the gravel seep into his perfect day.

  “Sire!” a rider called. He had dismounted his horse and was running to the king before the stallion had a chance to stop.

  “What is it?” the king asked, disdain in his voice.

  “We just received this, sire. You said to deliver any correspondence immediately.” The rider handed the king a wax sealed letter, his chest heaving as he spoke.

  “What a shame,” the king said as he opened the letter and began to read.

  “Sire?”

  “That this had to ruin my perfect day. Send a feather to Forrest immediately. Tell him to meet me in the main hall.”

  “Right away, sire.”

  The rider snapped his fingers and a long dark feather made itself snug between his thumb and forefinger. Drawing it close, he whispered a sentence that ended with, Forrest only. As he let it go, the feather stretched and took the form of a large rook, flying to meet its mark.

  ***

  “They are rather dreary, aren’t they?” Doc said, observing a sample through his microscope.

  “Oi! You know when you talk like that you hurt my feelings,” Amour chided, and cocked his head with a smirk on his ruby lips.

  “Amour, you know I never understand your,” Doc paused and swatted the air as if to remove an obstacle, “whimsy.”

  “You just don’t understand good humour.”

  Amour slipped his hand through his perfectly styled chestnut hair and propped his feet up on Doc’s desk. Forrest came up behind him and knocked them off before messing with his hair.

  “Or the more obvious answer is, you’re not funny.” He laughed. “But on a serious note, why are our colours becoming so dull?” Forrest asked as he pinched his chin, his blue-black skin flawless.

  “You heard the man. He didn’t say they were dull, he said they were dreary,” Amour retorted with a quick flick of his finger across his nose before pointing to Doc. His warm ivory skin was glowing.

  “Yeah, it’s the same thing,” Forrest and Doc declared in unison.

  “Well, that was unnerving,” Mort said, her voice monotone.

  Filling the doorway, she shuffled across the room and sank into Doc’s white love seat, in front of his workspace.

  Forrest rubbed his temple and let out a heavy sigh. “Nice of you to join us, Mort,” He walked over to her, bent down, and examined her eyes. “You feeling ok?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Mort batted away his hands and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Look at her. The change in Mort is undeniable. She’s gone from being black to grey in the space of days,” Forrest exclaimed, standing, and gesturing to Mort’s eyes.

  Mort tended to appear washed out wherever she went, always dressed in black, with a pixie haircut and snow-white skin. And it never helped when she visited Doc. His office was entirely off-white and had the character of a psychiatrist’s consulting office.

  Doc, always in a blue lab coat that paired with his piercing cyan eyes, scruffy grey hair and a tired pale face, was normally to be found in the middle of the room. Where he had an exposed white brick workstation topped with white marble that had a built-in sink and Bunsen burners. Glass cupboards full of equipment were behind the station, reaching the ceiling. They had a small step stool wedged in between them and the wall. Across the room, a fridge large enough to hide a body sat next to a smaller chiller, with clear glass doors and samples sitting inside, wrapped with various coloured labels. While the burst of sunlight through the crystal walls, was spectacular, it only exaggerated the rooms monochrome flare.

  “We’ve never had this issue before. There have always been four of you, with one now gone.” Doc paused, took off his glasses, and rubbed his forehead with an arthritic hand. “Now that there are three of you, we will have to continue running tests and find what the issue is,” he said, his voice trailing into a whisper.

  Doc drew a freshly sealed syringe from a drawer in his work desk and took a seat next to Mort. Taking her hand in his and meeting her eyes he asked simply, with a soft smirk, if he could draw her blood. She replied with a nod and a smile she carried only for him.

  “Ok, fine. But can you please tell me why this…” Amour paused to air quote with his fingers. “Change is affecting our clothes. Pink is not my colour.” He pinched the fabric of his shirt and curled his lips like he’d just been told it was stolen from a corpse.

  Each wore a different colour. Amour constantly looked as if he was dressed for a party. He had on a rose-coloured long shirt with encrusted sleeves and neckline and paired it with fitted mahogany trousers. Forrest was dressed in his usual, casual green sleeveless tunic that revealed his muscular arms, and dark olive-green ankle banded trousers. Mort wore a hooded A-line dress that fell to her feet, with long wide-ended sleeves and a silver triangular pattern covering the mid-section. Their irises mirrored their clothing, although they had the tendency to change with how they were feeling.

  “That’s seriously what you’re worried about!?” Forrest yelled as he paced the room. H
is clothes once a dark green now looked like they had been washed too many times.

  “Your colours are connected to your abilities, and to you personally, so much so that not only do your eyes reflect it, but your blood does, too. It stands to reason that your core is naturally diluting your clothes to how it is feeling. Everything in Tincture is connected,” Doc said, almost done collecting a blood sample from Mort, the syringe filled now with black blood.

  “Who even names a place Tincture? Sounds like we should be living in a palace of metal, not one of glass.” Mort laughed but met blank faces.

  Doc’s room was one of many in the Palette Palace, given its name for the different shards of stained glass used to construct it. Situated in the middle of Tincture, it was encased with trees that grew around it in a circle. It was the only man-made structure they had. The rest of the land was a thick forest. Rocky mountains grew around the outskirts, some covered in snow, and others a blank canvas of stone. A giant shining sun sat in the sky emitting a gorgeous golden glow, with two separate halves, it resembled a sunflower on one side of its face and a black sphere on its other side. The sun would shine for ten days, ’til one by one the petals that made it were extinguished. Once the sun had un-bloomed, the moon would blossom and fill the sky with a lavender glow for ten days before the cycle repeated itself.

  “This isn’t a palace. It’s a prison,” Forrest stated.

  Tincturians were born with white eyes, and on their first birthday they would change to a colour that hinted at their ability out of a number of possibilities. Those born with green and orange eyes were gifted with talents such as gardeners’ thumbs, an incredible skill for climbing, or the ability to talk with animals. They were seen as commoners by the king and all the residents in the Palette Palace, but the forest dwellers saw the glass structure for what it really was, an eyesore. They used their gifts to rapidly grow hollow trees that could be lived in. Those with the power of strength could break through stone and live in the mountains, and some preferred to dig their own burrows and remain underground.

  “I want to be free of this place,” Forrest hissed, pacing the room between the workstation and the fridges. “I want to live with our real people, in the world we love.”

  “Are we dying?” Amour asked, his face hard like stone.

  Forrest stopped at the office window and looked out at the woods, hiding his eyes as they changed to a shade of green so dark that they could be mistaken for Mort’s.

  “Am I the only one who until now thought we couldn’t die?” Amour asked, looking round. “Seeing Harmony like that…her body shattered on the ground, and her beautiful blue colour running out of her like nothing more than water.” His brows pulled together as he looked down at his twisted hands. “Can we die?”

  “Until we run more tests, I won’t know for sure,” Doc said, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “But, in my opinion, it doesn’t look good.”

  “So what do we do?” Forrest asked and cleared his throat. “And how do we find out who was up there with her?”

  Harmony fell to her death from a balcony on the top storey of the palace, the wing only a few were allowed in – Harmony not one of them. Her body left a crack in the glass floor that hadn’t been fixed yet. It’s sight torturous for them all.

  “I’m not sure. Like I said, this has never happened before. We’ll need to consult the king,” Doc replied.

  Forrest. Forrest. Forrest. A voice swept over them. A large rook came to rest upon Forrest’s arm. It relayed a message for him, while the rest of the room could only hear the bird’s squawks.

  “…King Tinc requires your presence immediately. He will be in the main hall. Do not keep him waiting.” The bird finished its piece before breaking into a pile of feathers around his feet.

  “What is it?” Doc asked.

  “The king wants to speak to me. Hopefully he will have a better grasp on what is happening,” Forrest murmured, walking out of the room he left the feathers in disarray on the floor.

  Two

  The coffee was stale. She choked on it as she chugged the rest from the mug, welcoming its bitter taste. Justine wasn’t sure what the time was, but she knew she’d spent another night in her office, words printed on her face from case files she used as pillows. Her waist-length hair was still in a plait, but it was no longer tidy, with a pencil nudged behind her ear. Once she’d finished all of yesterday’s coffee she stuck on a fresh pot, impatient for the caffeine she craved. While listening to the drip and occasional hiss of water hitting the hot plate, she sunk back behind her desk and opened the file she had been looking at before she fell asleep: a teenage girl with mud coloured hair, pinned to the front page, her teeth dressed in metal and a smile full of hope.

  Where are you? she asked the photo, hoping it would respond, yet it remained silent, as it had done for almost a decade. Justine was young and in good shape but sleeping in an office chair impacted her joints. Stretching and cracking her neck, she readied herself to read the words that she had memorised.

  Halfway down a page, a sudden knock on the door took her attention. Justine grabbed her watch from the desk and saw that it was six-forty-five in the morning, still dark outside, which was normal for March. She stayed silent and hoped they would think no one was in. But she was sure they could see her lamp light from outside, her office door partly opaque glass. Another knock came, insistent.

  A voice on the other side of the door came fast and trembling. “Hello? Please I know you’re in there. I need your help.”

  Justine scrunched her fists and propped her forehead on them, before using them like clubs against her temple.

  “Sorry, business hours are between twelve and ten. Come back later,” Justine blurted.

  It was silent for a moment. Then the doorknob started to turn and rattle, but thankfully she had remembered to lock it. She grabbed her taser gun from the desk and stormed towards the door.

  “I told you. Come back later!” Justine yelled, her knuckles white around the taser.

  “They won’t listen to me. No one will listen! Please, Miss Brick. I need your help. It’s a matter of life and death,” the stranger pleaded, the voice of a broken woman.

  Running a hand through her hair, Justine paced the small space of the office. “Step away from the door.”

  When she saw the figure shift through the opaque glass, she turned the lock and swung open the door. A middle-aged woman dressed in different shades of bland brown stood a few feet from the entrance, her eyes bloodshot and wet danced around Justine’s face. A manilla envelope was clutched close to her chest.

  “Please,” the woman begged, her voice trailing off with her shuddered crying. With a shaken grip she reached forward with the envelope in her hand for Justine to take.

  She wanted to turn her away, to tell her to come back at a more acceptable time. But Justine couldn’t, not after looking into her eyes and seeing the pain, a pain she knew all too well. “Come in,” she said, and dropped her hand holding the taser gun before taking the envelope from the stranger. As she closed the door behind them, she read the words etched into the frosted glass and questioned her life choices. Justine Brick – Private Investigator.

  ***

  “Here.” Justine handed the woman a coffee in an old, chipped mug. The woman nodded and stroked the china, seeming to get comfort from the warmth.

  “You’re not at all what I expected,” the stranger stammered, a shake in her voice.

  Justine poured herself a cup and sat back behind her desk, moving the taser gun to an open drawer where it was in reach. Following the wondering gaze of the stranger, she took in her office, forgetting how much it resembled a janitor’s cupboard, with a table squashed in.

  “What do you mean?”

  “From the stories I’ve heard about you, I thought you would be a lot…bigger, taller, is what I mean.” The stranger took a quick sip of her drink with darting eyes.

  Justine had a small frame, her wardrobe relaxed trousers
and the same pinstripe shirt in seven different colours. She wasn’t much of a mystery. Her hazel eyes were accompanied by bags that looked like they had taken a decade to make, but which blended well with her olive skin.

  “Well, people never really expect much from a twenty-something girl.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that…” the woman began, but Justine waved her words away.

  “It’s ok. I know what you meant. How about you tell me who you are and what I can do for you?” Justine said, her elbows on the table now. She clasped her hands together and waited for the story.

  The stranger nodded and squeezed her hands around the cup. She took another glug and then placed the cup on the desk, before looking down at her hands.

  “My name is Grace Davies. I live here in London with my husband Ken. We had a daughter, Melody. Ten years ago, she went missing. They searched for her for six weeks and told us they believed she was taken by a known serial killer at the time who targeted young girls. Melody was fourteen.” Grace played with her wedding ring and bit her lip. “Eventually they found her clothes and handbag in a ditch a few miles from her school. They were covered in blood, ripped, and torn. That was when they told us our daughter was almost certainly dead and that we would probably never find her body, never be able to put our baby to rest.” Her voice caught on a lump in her throat. With tear-filled eyes she met Justine’s gaze. “That was until we got this envelope in the post yesterday, and found a picture of our Melody, taken a few days ago.”

  “The person who took your daughter contacted you with a picture of her?” Justine wondered, her eyebrows raised.

  “That’s just it. She isn’t captive or with anyone. The picture was taken in front of a bus stop. She’s just walking. And then there’s the flash drive,” Grace said as she wiped her runny nose.